My research is focused around connecting the physical and virtual worlds (you may call this Cyber-Physical Systems or Internet of Things or Internet of Everything or Physical-Cyber-Social-Computing or <insert your favorite marketing term here>). The goal is to enable simple access to data irrespective of their source (sensors, embedded systems, Web, Semantic Web, Linked Data, social media, e.g., Twitter, etc.) and scalable management of this data using a single access abstraction (REST) and a single data model (Linked Data).

Specifically, this targets the efficient access and management of dynamic and static data ("Linked Streams"), data management in the Cloud to enable scalability, semantic descriptions of all data sources and data to enable self-organization and plug-and-play deployments, and platforms and development tools to facilitate analytics and decision-making.

A key design goal is to combine distributed computing (filter and process close to the source) with centralized approaches (Cloud) and let the user decide based on application-specific requirements how this combination should look like (choosing the individual "sweet spot" on a continuous scale from completely decentralized via various decentralized-centralized combinations to completely centralized). My assumption is that the decentralized-centralized combinations will be dominant to achieve properties such as scalability, robustness, and privacy at the same time. This work combines my research on Linked Data, sensor networks, semantics, and distributed systems.